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  Netflix character poster for The Sandman. (l-t-r: Dream, Desire, Joanna Constantine, Death) The Sandman makes having LGBT rep onscreen look easy , putting other studios in the same genre,  comic book adaptations, to shame. (Pause to stare long and hard at Disney.) - The Sandman TV show on Netflix is a live action adaptation of Neil Gaiman's comic book, in the same universe as DC characters such as Lucifer Morningstar and John Constantine. The Sandman clearly shows us what good LGBT representation can look like, if studios like Marvel/Disney weren't so terrified of embracing it. - Note: 'Good' does not necessarily mean that all the LGBT characters are good/pure heroes or without flaw. 'Good' in this context means that the LGBT characters are part of the story, they have motivations and character depth, they're diverse. - Case in point, the LGBT representation is one of the main talking points so far about the show. On day 4 of its debut, I typ...

No, fans aren't 'racist' if they're unbothered about Ben/Phastos, it's simply a lacklustre ship. We are barely into 2022 and I see a worrying trend among fans of Marvel Studios/The MCU claiming that any fan not fully supporting one particular 'ship in The MCU is a racist. Wow! How come? Well this latest stan Twitter row is due to recent MCU movie Eternals, which was only released two months ago. Some more vocal fans of The MCU are currently claiming that fans who don't care about new couple, Phastos/Ben, are racist. They claim that fans have shown more support to the recent Loki show on Disney Plus than they have to Phastos/Ben in the Eternals movie, claiming it's because Loki is white while Phastos and Ben are not (the actors are Black and Lebanese respectively). The same fans claim that MCU Loki has more fans generally than Phastos and his walk-on-character-husband named Ben. (Well, obviously? Loki has been a fan favorite for ten years. ...

[Image description: Ben and Phastos outside their residence on Earth, one of the most used images for the Disney couple.] Ben: the Eternal's Laura Barton I wanted to do a short review of the character Ben in Eternals because he's in my wheelhouse being gay and MENA and also because he's LITERALLY the first named character played by a MENA actor in the MCU since Iron Man 1's Ho Yinsen and the Ten Rings. Which was a long ass time ago. So, in the same year as the first Muslim characters to appear onscreen since 2008's Iron Man 1 , we also got a side character (an upgrade from a walk on, I guess?) in Ben Stoss, the partner to one of the Eternal's main characters. I'm reviewing Ben only, by the way. I'm not reviewing the movie as I remain unmoved by it and honestly don't care. I am Eternals-ambivalent... possibly leaning into averse because it's Disney. The reason I feel this way is because of how Disney has treated us queer fans ...

  What's his name, Marvel? (NB: For the record, any of my criticism on this post is directed to Marvel Studios and Disney, not to the actors Haaz Sleiman and Brian Tyree Henry, pictured above, whom I wish nothing but the best for.) Now, I have some marketing moans about Eternals from Marvel studios. Today's date is August 28, 2021. There's been a bit of a buzz about the MCU's "first openly gay character" recently (how dare y'all disrespect Gay Joe Russo like that), and that the character, Phastos (played by Brian Tyree Henry), will be shown in the movie to be married to another man (played by Haaz Sleiman). The MCU's first gay couple, as Marvel studios themselves keep touting. Anyway, I wondered to myself: what's the husband's name? So I set to Google. I Googled the cast list for Eternals, and this a screenshot from today of the lower end of the results: Those are the results. Let's just zoom in on the character I'm...